Yasmina Khadra - The Swallows of Kabul

Qassim seizes the jailer by the shoulders and looks him right in the eye. “Atiq, my poor Atiq. If you don’t get a grip on yourself right away, you’re going to wind up so lost, you won’t find your way home. Forget that witch. In a few days, she’ll join the ones who’ve gone before her, and a new one will come and take her place. I don’t know how she managed to bamboozle you, but if I were you, I’d try not to be fooled by the way she looks. You’re the one who needs attention, not her. I warned you the other day. You spend too much time in your bad moods, Atiq, all locked up inside them. Be careful, I told you: One day, you won’t be able to get out. You didn’t listen to me, and what’s the result? Your black moods weakened you, and when some smelly bitch appeared, all she had to do was whine and it broke your heart. Let her croak. I can assure you, she’s right where she belongs. After all, she’s only a woman.”

Atiq is beside himself. Caught up in a whirlwind, he doesn’t know where to hide his head or what to do with his hands when he catches himself cursing the whole world. He understands nothing, nothing at all. He’s become someone else, he’s been overwhelmed by a different person, who pummels him and submerges him, and without whom he’d feel like a cripple. How can he explain the shaking fits that make him shiver during the hottest hours of the day, or the sweats that cool him off a minute later? Never before has he lifted so much as a finger to help people in trouble, not even when a flick would have sufficed, so how can he explain his new boldness, his new ardor in this fight against the inevitable? How can he explain the impetuous wave of emotion that undoes him whenever he meets the prisoner’s eyes? He has never thought himself capable of sharing any stranger’s distress. His whole adult life has been based on this ambition: to be able to pass a torture victim without lingering over him, to be able to return from a cemetery with his resolutions intact. And suddenly here he is, desperately involved in the fate of a female prisoner whom no one can rescue from the shadow of the scaffold. Atiq doesn’t understand why, all of a sudden, his heart is beating in another’s place, nor why he has accepted so readily, from one day to the next, a change in himself of such magnitude that nothing will ever again be as it was before.

He had expected to find in Qassim Abdul Jabbar a modicum of indulgence, some inclination to leniency that would help him petition the qazi and induce them to reconsider their verdict. Qassim’s reaction was disappointing — or rather, unforgivable; now Atiq loathes him entirely. Everything’s over between them. No sermon, no holy man will reconcile them. Qassim is nothing but a brute. He has no more heart than a cudgel, no more mercy than a snake. He embodies the common evil, and he will die of it. They will all die of it, without exception: the qazi , crouched inside their venerable monstrousness; the howling fanatics, feverish and obscene, who are already making preparations to fill the stadium on Friday; the prestigious guests, who are coming to share the joy of public executions; the notables, who will applaud the implementation of the Sharia with the same hands that shoo flies, and wave away the lifeless remains with the same gestures that bless the grotesque zeal of the executioners. All of them. Including Kabul itself, the accursed city, every day more expert in killing, more dedicated to the opposite of living. In this land, the public celebrations have become as appalling as the lynchings themselves.

Atiq returns home. “I’m not going to let them murder her,” he protests.

“Why are you getting yourself in such a state?” Musarrat admonishes him. “She’s not the first, and she won’t be the last. It’s insane, the way you’re acting. You have to pull yourself together.”

“I don’t want to pull myself together.”

“You’re doing yourself a useless injury. Look at you! Anyone would think you’ve gone crazy.”

Atiq shakes a threatening finger at her. “I forbid you to call me crazy.”

“Then pull yourself together, right now,” Musarrat urges him again. “You’re acting like someone who doesn’t know where he is. And whenever I try to reason with you, you get twice as angry.”

Atiq seizes her by the throat and jams her against the wall. “Stop your yapping, you old hag. I can’t stand the sound of your voice any longer, or the smell of your body, either. . ”

He lets her go.

Shocked by her husband’s violence and devastated by his words, Musarrat sinks to the floor, her hands holding her bruised throat, her eyes bulging in disbelief.

Atiq makes an infuriated gesture, picks up his turban and his whip, and leaves the house.

THERE’S A HUGE CROWD at the mosque; the beggars and the disabled veterans are engaged in a bitter struggle for what little space is left in the recesses of the sanctuary.

Atiq finds the spectacle so revolting that he spits over his shoulder and decides to say his prayers somewhere else. As he moves off, he runs across Mirza Shah, who’s hastening to join the faithful before the muezzin’s call. He hurries past Atiq without paying him any attention. Then Mirza Shah stops, turns around, and gazes at his old friend for a long time before scratching his head under his turban and continuing on his way. Atiq is walking straight ahead, with an aggressive step and squinting eyes. He crosses streets without looking either left or right, indifferent to the blaring horns and the cries of the wagoners. Someone calls out to him from inside a small café; Atiq doesn’t hear him. He wouldn’t hear a thunderstorm if it should burst over his head. He hears only the blood pulsing in his temples and sees only his furies, all of them busily suffusing his mind with darkness: Qassim, making light of his torment; Musarrat, not understanding the depth of his grief; heaven, looking elsewhere; the ruins, turning their backs on him; the eager spectators, preparing to crowd the stadium on Friday; the Taliban agents, strutting along the thoroughfares; the mullahs, haranguing the crowds, shaking fingers more deadly than sabers. .

As Atiq slams the jailhouse door behind him, the confused sounds that have pursued him here fade away. All at once, the abyss is before him, and a silence as deep as a long fall. What’s happening to him? Why not open the door again and let the sounds catch up with him, along with the twilight, the smells, and the dust? Panting, bent forward at the waist, he walks up and down the corridor. His whip slips from his hand; he doesn’t pick it up. He keeps pacing, pacing, his beard pressed into the hollow of his throat, his hands behind his back. He comes to an abrupt stop, springs to the cell door, unlocks it, and resolutely yanks it open.

Frightened by the jailer’s violence, Zunaira raises her arms to protect her face.

“Get out of here,” he says to her. “Night is falling. Take advantage of it and run away. Get as far as possible from this city of madmen. Run as fast as you can, and whatever happens, don’t look back. If you do, you’ll suffer the same fate as Lot’s wife.”

Zunaira fails to grasp what her guard is getting at. She cowers under her blanket, certain that her hour has come.

“Please get out,” Atiq implores her. “Don’t stay here. Go away. I’ll tell them it was my fault. I’ll say I must have padlocked the chains wrong. I’m a Pashtun, like them. They’ll curse me, but they won’t hurt me.”

“What’s going on?”

“Please don’t look at me like that. Put your burqa back on and leave.”

“And go where?”

“Anywhere. Just don’t stay here.”

She hangs her head. Her hands reach for something under the blanket, something that’s hard to reach and that she will not reveal. “No,” she says. “I’ve already destroyed one household. I don’t want to ruin any others.”